Get That Life: How I Became the First Woman to Edit ESPN The Magazine

Alison Overholt didn't grow up reading American magazines, partly because she spent much of her youth in Hong Kong. But she did have ambition, and a sense that she was going to "light the world on fire." She also loved sports, having played basketball growing up. Since 2016, Overholt has been the editor-in-chief of ESPN The Magazine. She holds the distinction of being the first woman to edit a general interest sports magazine. She is also the editor-in-chief of espnW, which she helped launch in 2009. In February, Overholt accepted a National Magazine Award for General Excellence on behalf of ESPN The Magazine, one of the industry’s highest honors. Here's how she got there:

I studied government at Harvard. I thought I might become a journalist or go the public policy route. I was trying things but nothing quite seemed to fit. I wrote for the Harvard Crimson. I interned at CNBC in Hong Kong. I interned at a think tank in D.C. I worked for Bloomberg Business News during the school year. It was so minute-by-minute, which was impressive to me as a consumer, but it wasn't in my DNA to try to break news 30 seconds before someone else did.

During my senior year, I froze. Most of my peers interested in media were moving home to take unpaid internships or going to small towns to be beat reporters at local papers. The prospect of scraping by on a rough salary scared the heck out of me. I got a job in management consulting at KPMG [after graduating in 1998] in the public policy and health care division in Washington. I thought I could apply my intellect and pay the bills. It took me approximately five minutes to realize that I'd made a horrible mistake.

I was really unhappy. I would get my work done as soon as I could and sit in my cubicle and read magazines, especially Fast Company. It was beautiful and fun. They were profiling incredible people. I was dog-earing every page of the magazine. I realized that I wanted to be a journalist.

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I thought my life was going to change — but I never heard from him again.

In 2000, I made a New Year's resolution to write a letter to Fast Company. I wrote to the managing editor [and said] I thought that Fast Company was doing some of the most exciting work in the world. Wouldn't they take a risk and think about hiring me to join the team?

While I was waiting to hear back, I had to break into the business somehow. I got a copy of Writer's Market [a guide to breaking into the publishing industry] and learned to write query letters. I started pitching stories to the Washington City Paper. A month after sending the letter to Fast Company, one of the magazine's co-founders, Bill Taylor, called and left a message [saying,] "We got your letter. You sound interesting. I'm down in D.C. pretty often. We should get together sometime." I was so excited. I thought my life was going to change — but I never heard from him again.

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I found out about the Radcliffe Publishing Course [now the Columbia Publishing Course], a five-week summer program that exposes you to all aspects of the publishing industry. It was $5,000, which was everything I had.

Courtesy of Alison Overholt

I quit my job in June. My dad came to visit me before the program started. We were walking through Georgetown when a gorgeous couch inside a Pottery Barn caught my eye. My dad said, "If you were still a consultant, you could afford that couch." That was a reality check moment for me. I'd rather be poor and do what I love than have this couch and be miserable.

[After the course, its director] Lindy Hess called and said she had convinced Fast Company's other co-founder, Alan Weber, to talk to me. He told me there was an opening in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley office and that I should talk to George Anders, the new bureau chief. He offered me a job as a staff writer. Eight months after I made my New Year's resolution, it felt like my life was going to start.

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A new editor-in-chief came to Fast Company in 2003 and the staff started to turn over. I moved to New York in November because, especially with all the cutbacks, I needed to be at headquarters.

By this point, I wanted to be an editor more than I wanted to be a writer. Editors get to figure out how to bring together a package or a section or the whole book. But I had the painful realization that even though this was my dream organization, I wasn't going to grow here. So I started looking around. I interviewed a gazillion times and every time, I was told I didn't have enough experience as an editor.

Around the time that I moved to New York, one of my colleagues introduced me to people from ESPN The Magazine. I interviewed there but didn't hear anything back [until] December 2004. They offered me a job as a general editor at the magazine.

It was an incredible opportunity to be in those rooms, but I felt so in over my head.

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[After] I edited the front of the book, which at the time was news, notes, and jokes, I started editing a sports business column and two-page spreads that were about different aspects of sports. I learned a lot about packaging and storytelling. There was an opening to do investigative work on the enterprise team and I asked for that job. I was editing the very earliest pieces on concussions in the NFL, investigations into the steroid trade. It was an exciting time.

When he was the editor-in-chief, Gary Belsky called me into his office one day and said, "For a young men's magazine, we do a disproportionate number of stories about female athletes because you argue better than other people when you're pitching stories."

Gary introduced me in 2008 to Laura Gentile, who was heading up a research project on media products specifically for women. She [asked me to join] a task force of people from programming, marketing and sales, product and technology, and editorial. How is it that you go about building a totally new media offering for women and sports? It was an incredible opportunity to be in those rooms but at the same time, I felt so in over my head. I had never been exposed to the other ways the business worked beyond the traditional editorial world.

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The plan was to launch espnW first for high school girls and over time, grow it to encompass adult women. In 2009, they brought me on full-time to help edit the high school girls' magazine and be involved in the launch of a website that would eventually become espnW. It was my dream job. It spoke to me as a 16-year-old girl wishing that there was a sports magazine that I could buy, and me as a thirtysomething-year-old wishing that there was more storytelling that spoke to me as a former athlete and a fan of sports.

In 2010, my mom got sick. The breast cancer was very advanced by the time she found it. I got pregnant that same month. I was in the office at one point trying to get an issue out the door. It was 3 in the morning. I was the only one left in the building. I was in the bathroom every 20 minutes puking. My husband is a sportswriter and on the road all the time. I was trying to figure out how you make this life work with a child.

In September, I told Laura I was pregnant and I was leaving the company. She said, "Don't be afraid of this." I thought, You don't get it! You don't understand! It seemed like she was so much further along in her career. How could she possibly understand what it was like for me in the moment that I was in?

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When I left ESPN, it was really a gut-wrenching thing. It killed me to walk away from that passion project and not get to be a part of building it, but it felt very clearly in that moment like it was something that I had to do.

Every second, I was learning something that I hadn't known before.

I started digital media consulting, positioning myself as a translator. I've got a business mind and a storyteller's soul, and I'm really into technology. What are the authentic stories that you could be telling? What's the set of business goals you're trying to reach?

I was working for big brands, like the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. It forced me so far out of my comfort zone. I had to give presentations and convince people to buy what I was selling. I was learning how to build teams. Every second, I was learning something that I hadn't known before. It made me better.

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The Breast Cancer Research Foundation was training [a team] for the 2013 New York City Marathon and they asked me to join. I started posting on social media about it and saw that Laura Gentile was also training for the marathon. We got together for a drink. She told me about how there was a really energized conversation around women and leadership happening at ESPN. She asked if I'd ever thought about going back [to espnW]. Without hesitation, I said, "Every single day." She said, "We're looking for an editor-in-chief."

I started the job in April 2014. I was so fired up about it. I finally had skills that I needed: the sales piece, the presentation skills. Within ESPN, there is a group of very passionate, dedicated women who are creating storytelling where women are the central characters. The goal was to communicate that as effectively as possible, whether it's to advertisers or to the world at large.

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In early 2016, John Kosner, the GM of ESPN print and digital, called me into his office. He said, "We'd like for you to be the next editor-in-chief of ESPN The Magazine." I just about fell off my chair. I said, "Whoa. Starting when?" And he said, "Tomorrow."

A few days after the staffing announcement, some folks reached out to our leadership and said, "Do you realize she's the first woman to ever have a job like this?" They didn't realize it. They weren't doing it to make a statement. But it was important for me not to run away from that and to acknowledge what that means to other women.

When I first got to the magazine and was editing a story, I had a writer say, "Why don't we ask somebody who knows something about basketball?" Almost every interview I've ever done and most speaking appearances where I've taken questions, I inevitably get some version of, "Don't you think it's harder for you to your job well because you've never played football?" That sounds like it's about your experience and your skills, but really, that's about being a woman. None of the four men who had this job before me were ever asked if they played football and they're not athletes. I feel confident about my skills and abilities. I've always been able to meet those challenges. My writers and forward-facing talent receive the most vicious misogynist abuse on social media. I don't know how they handle it.

That sounds like it's about your experience and your skills, but really, that's about being a woman.

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It's not immediately obvious to people that I'm half Asian. I'm the only 6-foot Filipina you're going to meet. If there's a great story about an Asian athlete, I would like us to be covering that. One of the things that's really exciting to me at ESPN is that there's such an embrace of our global expansion. We're doing a huge amount of storytelling internationally. I'm looking for Hispanic storytellers, African-American storytellers, and Asian storytellers.

The great thing is, sports are universal. The stories that we tell through sports — the epic trials, the painful failures, the challenges that athletes try to overcome, the incredible feats that they try to accomplish — they're human stories.